Educational data-mining is an evolving discipline that focuses on the improvement of self-learning and adaptive methods. It is used for finding hidden patterns or intrinsic structures of educational data. In the arena of education, the heterogeneous data is involving and continuously growing in the paradigm of big-data. To extract meaningful information adaptively from big educational data, some specific data mining techniques are needed. This paper presents a clustering approach to partition students into different groups or clusters based on their learning behavior. Furthermore, personalized e-learning system architecture is presented which detects and responds to teaching contents according to the students' learning capabilities. The primary objective includes the discovery of optimal settings, in which learners can improve their learning capabilities. Moreover, the administration can find essential hidden patterns to bring the effective reforms in the existing system. The clustering methods K-Means, K-Medoids, Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise, Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster Tree and Clustering by Fast Search and Finding of Density Peaks via Heat Diffusion (CFSFDP-HD) are analyzed using educational data mining. It has been observed that more robust results can be achieved by the replacement of existing methods with CFSFDP-HD. The data mining techniques are equally effective in analyzing the big data to make education systems vigorous.

Sentiment analysis is also known as opinion mining which shows the people’s opinions and emotions about certain products or services. The main problem in sentiment analysis is the sentiment polarity categorization that determines whether a review is positive, negative or neutral. Previous studies proposed different techniques, but still there are some research gaps, i) some studies include only 3 sentiment classes: positive, neutral and negative, but none of them considered more than 3 classes ii) sentiment polarity features were considered on individual basis but none of them considered on both individual and on combined basis iii) No previous technique considered five sentiment classes with 3 sentiment polarity features such as a verb, adverb, adjective and their combinations. In this study, we propose a sentiment polarity categorization technique for a large data set of online reviews of Instant Videos. A comprehensive data set of five hundred thousand online reviews is used in our research. There are five classes (Strongly Negative, Negative, Neutral, Positive and Strongly Positive). We also consider three polarity features Verb, Adverb, Adjective and their combinations with their different senses in review-level categorization. Our experiments for review-level categorization show promising outcomes as the accuracy of our results is 81 percent which is 3 percent better than many previous techniques whose average accuracy is 78 percent.

This paper proposes a new meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, namely Mud Ring Algorithm (MRA) that mimics the mud ring feeding behaviour of bottlenose dolphins in Atlantic coast of Florida. The inspiration of MRA is mainly based on the foraging behaviour of bottlenose dolphins and their mud ring feeding strategy. This strategy is applied by dolphins to trap fish via creating a plume by a single dolphin moving his tail swiftly in the sand and swims around the group of fish. The fishes become disoriented and jump over the surface only to find the waiting mouths of dolphins. MRA optimization algorithm mathematically simulates this feeding strategy and proves its optimization effectiveness through a comprehensive comparison with other meta-heuristic algorithms. Twenty-nine benchmark functions and four commonly used benchmark engineering challenges are used in the comparison. The statistical comparisons and results prove that the proposed MRA has the superiority in dealing with these optimization problems and can obtain the best solutions than other meta-heuristic optimizers.

Feature selection plays a crucial role in order to mitigate the high dimensional feature space in different classification problems. The computational cost is reduced, and the accuracy of the classification is improved by reducing the dimension of feature space. Hence, in the classification task, finding the optimal subset of features is of utmost importance. Metaheuristic techniques have proved their efficacy in solving many real-world optimization issues. One of the recently introduced physics-inspired optimization methods is Archimedes Optimization Algorithm (AOA). This paper proposes an Enhanced Archimedes Optimization Algorithm (EAOA) by adding a new parameter that depends on the step length of each individual while revising the individual location. The EAOA algorithm is proposed to improve the AOA exploration and exploitation balance and enhance the classification performance for the feature selection issue in real-world data sets. Experiments were performed on twenty-three standard benchmark functions and sixteen real-world data sets to investigate the performance of the proposed EAOA algorithm. The experimental results based on the standard benchmark functions show that the EAOA algorithm provides very competitive results compared to the basic AOA algorithm and five well-known optimization algorithms in terms of improved exploitation, exploration, local optima avoidance and convergence rate. In addition, the results based on sixteen real-world data sets ascertain that reduced feature subset yields higher classification performance when compared with the other feature selection methods.

Instance reduction is a pre-processing step devised to improve the task of classification. Instance reduction algorithms search for a reduced set of instances to mitigate the low computational efficiency and high storage requirements. Hence, finding the optimal subset of instances is of utmost importance. Metaheuristic techniques are used to search for the optimal subset of instances as a potential application. Antlion optimization (ALO) is a recent metaheuristic algorithm that simulates antlion’s foraging performance in finding and attacking ants. However, the ALO algorithm suffers from local optima stagnation and slow convergence speed for some optimization problems. In this study, a new modified antlion optimization (MALO) algorithm is recommended to improve the primary ALO performance by adding a new parameter that depends on the step length of each ant while revising the antlion position. Furthermore, the suggested MALO algorithm is adapted to the challenge of instance reduction to obtain better results in terms of many metrics. The results based on twenty-three benchmark functions at 500 iterations and thirteen benchmark functions at 1000 iterations demonstrate that the proposed MALO algorithm escapes the local optima and provides a better convergence rate as compared to the basic ALO algorithm and some well-known and recent optimization algorithms. In addition, the results based on 15 balanced and imbalanced datasets and 18 oversampled imbalanced datasets show that the instance reduction proposed method can statistically outperform the basic ALO algorithm and has strong competitiveness against other comparative algorithms in terms of four performance measures: Accuracy, Balanced Accuracy (BACC), Geometric mean (G-mean), and Area Under the Curve (AUC) in addition to the run time. MALO algorithm results show increment in Accuracy, BACC, G-mean, and AUC rates up to 7%, 3%, 15%, and 9%, respectively, for some datasets over the basic ALO algorithm while keeping less computational time.

It is challenging to achieve network load balancing, simultaneously meeting the quality of service (QoS) demands of bandwidth and delays. In this paper we have designed and implemented a multicast routing system over Software Defined Networking (SDN) and sFlow. The system has been developed on the top of RYU controller. Our main contributions are: (1) compatibility of our system with traditional multicast applications which are based on the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) v2 and multicast address; (2) choosing the optimum paths for multicast applications on the basis of currently available network bandwidth which is calculated accurately by sFlow; (3) reduction in unnecessary network traffic effectively and load balancing, thereby reducing the packet loss rate and delay in the multicast.